Losing weight is a challenging task that many people chronically struggle with. Many factors determine how hard it is to for an individual to lose weight such as genetics, health conditions and social condition. This does not mean that it cannot be done, only that you need to adapt it to your particular case.
Is it possible? Yes, you can lose 3 pounds a week and in safe manner, if done properly. To achieve this result you will need to combine 3 factors to reach the calorie deficit you are looking for:
- Ensure adjusted healthy meals providing the correct amount of ingredients you need
- Daily exercise to burn extra calories
- Boost your Basal Metabolic Rate
In this article we will share with you how to do it safely step by step.
Determine Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
What is BMR and why is it relevant? According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the amount of energy required to keep the body functioning at rest. It is the energy required to maintain vital functions such as circulation, respiration, cell production, and protein synthesis.
Simply put it is the energy you need to survive 1 day if you sleep and rest all day. This energy will only cover the needs for life supporting functions. It is influenced by age, gender, height, weight, body composition and health status.
Once you know how many calories your body needs to “survive” for one day you will be in a better position to calculate the appropriate calorie deficit to achieve your goals. You can use our free tool to calculate your BMR. If needed, you can find conversion tools for weight and height in our Weight Loss Free Tools page.
Set Realistic Targets
Now that you know how many calories your body needs to survive, how do we move on? The next step is to set your goals and calculate what is the calorie deficit you should be aiming for to achieve them.
One of the reasons why so many people fail to lose weight, and even more fail to maintain the new weight, is setting unrealistic goals. There is nothing wrong with being ambitious but when it comes to your body and health, it has been proven time over time that a healthy bodyweight is a long term process. The first phase is to lose the extra weight until you reach the desired weight. The second, and even more important phase, is to maintain that weight and improve your body physical performance.
Considering the objective of this article, we will start by calculating what is the daily calorie deficit required to burn 3 pounds in a week. Knowing that one pound of fat is about 3500 calories, 3 pounds are equivalent to 10500 calories. Dividing these 10500 calories by 7 days means you will need to be in a daily deficit of of 1500 calories. Keep in mind that the recommendation to lose weight in a healthy way is to work with a calorie deficit of 500 to 750 calories. These deficits should allow you to lose 1 or 2 pounds per week. You can also use our free Calorie Daily Deficit Calculator that will provide you the answer to your specific case.
The other aspect to consider is that the minimum daily calorie intake recommendation is 1200 calories for women and 1500 calories for men. Lower calorie intakes are used in very aggressive diet plans but these usually require healthcare or nutritionist overview. Additionally, very low calorie intake diets lead to a decrease of the BMR, which is exactly the opposite of what you would wish for.
So how do we achieve the 1500 daily calorie deficit? Depending on your BMR you will aim to create a calorie deficit via nutrition, making use of planned meals that will provide you the required calories, and complement the calorie deficit with physical activity that will burn the remaining calories to reach the total calorie deficit you are aiming for. Unless you are aiming for minor calorie deficits, use these 2 aspects to achieve your total number instead of going in very aggressive diets.
For this article I will use the example of a 45 years old female, 160 cm height and 80 kg. Her BMR will be 1414 calories.
The first obvious conclusion is that without breaking the recommended minimum daily calorie intake of 1200 calories, most of the calorie deficit will need to come from exercise and not from diet. In this case, the meal plan would deliver 1200 calories, causing a deficit of 214 calories. Exercise would need to burn 1286 calories per day for you to reach the intended 1500 calories deficit.
Looking at these numbers, if you find this plan to be too aggressive, you can reconsider the amount of weight you want to lose per week. Look at the big picture and decide if it is worth to follow this aggressive plan or if you would prefer to extend the time to reach your objectives. This is where you need to be realistic on how much are you willing to sacrifice to speed up getting your goals reached.
Another option would be to try to influence the BMR by increasing the daily calories needed just for function supporting activities. But let’s start with planning the meals!
Plan Your Meals
This is a critical part of your success, remember each calorie you consume in excess, you will need to burn otherwise you will not achieve your results. There are many meal planners available that will provide you with clear guidance on what you should eat to obtain the desired calories daily.
I would recommend you try the app “Eat This Much“. I don’t have any advantage in recommend this app, but I believe it is a great offer that can help you. You can chose the daily intake calories and the type of diet you are following (Keto, Vegetarian, Paleo) and it will provide you a meal plan in seconds. You can use the free plan, giving daily meal plans, or subscribe their premium plan, where you can plan the full week, get a grocery list and it is integrated in case you want to have it delivered at your home. The free plan is already great but has the limitation that you will always one day ahead instead of doing a proper weekly plan. The cost of the premium plan is also quite attractive and right now they have the Winter sale running allowing you to save additional 20%. You can find the details of the 2 plans in the picture bellow:
Regardless of the planner you choose to use, make sure to find one that you like and stay compliant. As you saw from our example, it is essential to make sure you are really consuming the right amount of calories or you will sabotage your results.
You can also choose to make use of diets without calorie restriction, like the Agoge Diet. This diet focus on eating the right food and intensive workouts as a way to get the perfect healthy body.
Time To Exercise
Now that we have discussed how to make sure you only get the calories you need via food, it is time to start sweating!
To achieve a calorie consumption of 1286 calories via exercise, I would recommend to plan 2 daily workout sessions. One focusing on bodyweight or weight lifting and another one with light to moderate cardio activity. The cardio session can be a 30 minutes fast walk, run or cycling session. The bodyweight session, I would recommend high calorie burning exercises like plank, rope skipping, burpees, jump jacks, leg lounges.
For more guidance on the training sessions you can subscribe into a gym or use apps that will suggest you what trainings you should do. I personally am a bit old school and think that basic exercises are actually the best. Most of the time I aim for plyometric exercises that use most of the body and put more effort on the bigger muscle groups to maximize the training effect.
Do not over complicate things: buy a smartwatch that will track the amount of calories you burn and start today with the exercises you can do. Progress and evolve into more demanding exercises as your fitness improves. Be reasonable! Do not try to do very demanding exercises that you are not fit to do, at the risk of injury and a huge step back to achieve your goals.
If you have a specific activity that you like it will be easier to motivate yourself and stay compliant to the plan long term. You can join the gym or do home exercises, and in both cases you will find plenty offers to meet your preferences: from dancing to yoga passing by combat sports. And believe me all of them will get you sweating and burning down calories.
This is another aspect where you need to be honest with yourself. If you feel that you cannot perform exercises to burn the amount of calories you wish, reconsider the calorie deficit and the time to achieve your goals to be more realistic.
You can find some training plans in our Reviews page that can be helpful to you.
Give Your Body The Quality Time Sleep It Needs
For people struggling with weight, sleep is usually the most common hidden culprit. It is amazing how everyone seems to minimize the contribution of sleep into how your body behaves.
Sleep will have 2 major effects on your body that have a direct impact on your bodyweight.
The lack of sleep is proven to increase the secretion of an hormone responsible by increasing the appetite, and decrease the secretion of the hormone that makes us feel satiated. Lack of sleep will make you feel hungry more frequently and requiring more food to feel good.
The second effect is related with the secretion of cortisol. Lack of sleep is proven to increase to secretion of cortisol. This hormone is responsible for adapting the body to cope with stressful situations. Increased levels of cortisol are associated with risk of increased body weight, reduced immune function and impaired cognitive function. Under stress situations your body will store more energy, in the form of fat tissue, and will feel less motivated, sabotaging your will to diet and train.
Do not overlook this aspect as it can have a dramatic impact on your results. Men should sleep 7-8 hours per day and women should sleep 8-10 hours per day. Not only should you sleep these hours but you should ensure quality time of sleep. If you bought a smartwatch for tracking the calories consumed in your training, most have a app to track sleep patterns. Pay some attention to it, and you will probably be surprised how much you have neglected your recovery time.
Document And Track Your Progress
It is a good practice to document your daily activities in a diary form. Create the habit to dedicate 10 minutes a day to note down your meal tracker, training summary and sleep patterns. I’m not a fan of weighting yourself every day and think you should focus and believe in the process. The results will come in time.
Besides the daily routine, create a weekly review routine. On the weekend select a day to weight yourself and record it on your diary. Use the weekend entry to make a review of the week, registering what went well and your deviations to the plan. Focus on your big goal, this is a marathon, not a sprint. As long as you are moving in the right direction, even if not at the speed you wished, you are making progress.
Adapt Your Plan To Your Progress
You should know that the BMR is a dynamic indicator and not a static number. As you loose weight, the BMR should decrease since you have less body mass to maintain.
For this reason you should recalculate your BMR and adjust the calorie deficit on a monthly basis, or when you realize you lost a considerable amount of weight. Be aware that easiest pounds you will lose are the first ones. As you get fitter, you will need more demanding exercises to cut the same amount of calories. On the other hand, you will be ready to perform more challenging exercises, that will burn more calories in less time.
Influence Your BMR
Here are 4 ways to influence your BMR, increasing the amount of calories needed just to support the life sustaining functions:
- Include in your diet foods and herbs that have what is called thermogenic effects. Some require more energy to be consumed, just to digest them, others have an impact on your metabolism, boosting your energy levels by burning more calories.
- Make use of dietary supplements that boost your energy and increase your inner temperature, which should translate into a higher BMR.
- Increase your muscle tissue. Muscle tissue will require more calories to maintain than fat tissue. Additionally, them ore muscle tissue your have the more calories you can burn in your exercises.
- Take a cold shower in the morning! The shock caused by the cold is said to boost your metabolist for the entire day.
Celebrate Your Achievements And Stay Motivated
Remember, success is not achieved overnight, it is rather the result of every day consistent efforts. It is the sum of all the small things you do everyday, and not the result of that amazing training you did 3 weeks ago. Walk the walk, and reap the benefits of it.
As the saying goes, your plan only lasts until you take the first hit. Do not be afraid of deviations to your plan, delays or obstacles that might block your progress. Focus, on your daily training and diet, and keep working, your are only competing with yourself to become your best version. Don’t hesitate to celebrate your successes and fall in love with the process.
Focus on small attainable goals that allow you to see progress. This will be one for the most efficient motivation tools: seeing the different in the mirror and in the performance. Over time stop worrying too much on the weight itself and focus on performance! Set challenges for yourself to push your limits to keep developing your fitness level.
You can find motivational videos in our Pinterest channel.
Conclusion
One of my favorite quotes is: “If you want something to change, provoke the change you want to see!”
The reason why I like it so much is because of the feeling of empowerment and ownership that it transmits. Losing weight is some times a hard process with ups and downs and you need to be prepared for it. But the most common reason why people fail to lose weight is because they either don’t really want to do it, or because they expect someone else to be responsible for making it happen.
If you are not willing to trade the immediate comfort/benefit for your long term goal, then you really don’t want it. Then it will be very hard to lose weight , and even harder to maintain that healthy weight afterwards. That is why your journey to lose weight is just the beginning of a life changing new mentality. You will fall in love with the process, you will love how you feel when you see your body is fully functional and you are at your best possible shape. You will love enjoying your life with more confidence and health! All that will come from becoming comfortable with discomfort that exercising causes on a daily basis.
But it is clearly worth it! Losing 3 pounds in a week is possible and you can do it in a healthy and safe way!
If you have doubts, concerns or health problems, do not hesitate to contact a healthcare professional to advice you on what to avoid and how to minimize and any risks.
The best day to start was yesterday, and the second best is today! So get your things together and:
- Calculate your BMR
- Set your goals
- Calculate the calorie deficit you need
- Get a meal planner
- Start exercising
- Start a diary
- Make sure you have quality rest time
- And enjoy life in your best possible shape
Yes, losing 3 pounds a week is possible and the only thing stopping you from doing it is yourself! Start now and stop blocking your own objectives!
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